[url=http://www.sportinglife.com/rugby-league/news/article/480/8962861/clubs-oppose-restructuringReported here.[/url

Sounds like Lenagan wants to go down the same road as football with the Premier League.

Pull up the drawbridge, keep all the money and let the lower tiers of the game rot.

I will quote 'uknown' we live in interesting times

I'm opposed to the 2 divisons of 12 into 3 divisions of 8 proposal which seemed far to complicated but now seems matters are in dissaray, with talk of staying at 14 teams. It could only happen in RL.

Hope we still go down the route of 2 relegated this season and a 12 team SL with 1 up 1 down thereafter.

Anyone know which way we voted?

last time I checked the English premier league still had promotion and relegation!

as for our club, didn't we go for league of 12 with one up one down?

I hope it does stay as it is. It hasn't been given long enough to see if it will help produce more young players in the long run and the calls for change just seem to me to be panic because of the loss of quality imports and exodus to the NRL. The only thing that does want looking at is the size of the playoffs. 6 teams would be better IMO.

I think it's the loss of interest from fans that's the worry.

No relegation has created dead rubber, meaningless matches.
The top 8 play-offs have lacked intensity and interest.
Having the same teams has become stale.

There needs to be P&R. For all the benefits of player production in a licensed system, there are harder felt negatives from a spectator viewpoint. I was sat on the fence at the time of licensing, but the game is becoming dull. The need to win league games all the time seems to have gone.

2001-2007 were by far the best seasons in RL.

I liked the idea of the 3 x 8 it would give the top 4 in the championship time to build gradually for a full on tilt at SL. In much the same way that football clubs build towards a good European campaign. I certainly failed to see what was so complicated about it. Maybe thats just me. For me it seemed that one person claimed it was complicated and the rest followed. 24 / 3 = 8 whats complicated? Top four of championship challenge themselves against the bottom 4 of SL and if they finish 4th or above they get a bigger bash at the big league next year. Not rocket science. Or have I missed something. The only issue I saw here was the salary cap for championship clubs.

Promotion and relegation how it used to be will only work if the championship clubs go FT or SL clubs are allowed to opperate on a PT basis. This is something I can certainly see happening as FT status is not sustainable for all the clubs.
The salary cap has produced a product that is much the same as before. Only 6 clubs have made the GF and one of those is so skint now it can't even make the play offs. I would relax the cap and allow clubs to spend as they see fit within a squad of 20 which then leaves space for youngsters coming through as no club can opperate with a squad of just 20. This way clubs like Hull who have better revenue streams can flourish. It really irks me that clubs like London can allegedly spend to the full cap the same as us, yet we have really made massive strides to progress the club financially off the field. (I am a supporter of the London franchise though. Its simply run shockingly.)

I am really concerned though that with less than a year to go until these changes were to come into effect they are now scrapped and we are still drifting. It will not assist the game commercially one bit. The RFL need to grow a pair and quickly or hand over the game at the top level to the clubs, similar to the Premiership in football which is seperate to the Football league.

TBH the RFL have made their beds there the second they bent over backwards the way they did with Bradford.
Franchising/licencing became untenable the second they showed that hand because it then became clear that the rules were not being used fairly.

There have always been these types of matches.


Reducing the number of teams in the play-offs to 6 would largely fix this.


Even under P&R you largely had the same teams with the same 2 or 3 yo-yoing between SL and the lower league.


There really doesn't. In fact, it's the last thing SL needs.

But then with licensing's flush having been thoroughly busted, that just leaves the NRL model. Which has been a success - but do we have the stomach for all that entails? Finally and unambiguously pulling up the ladder? Rationalisation (mergers!)?

Bottom line is crowds are decreasing, even the most ardent fans seem to becoming disillusioned. The top teams see league games as pointless and bottom clubs look resigned to having next to no impact on the season.
This kind of apathy is killing the game and something needs to happen, what that something is is the key question.
Back in the heady days of the 80's there certainly seemed more to play for. Yorkshire cup, JP cup, league, relegation, premiership, floodlit etc... Now one hard cup draw early on and a few injuries and it can be season over.

Or, just possibly, years of austerity and real-terms pay-cuts are biting and folk have other things to spend what little cash they have on. Like food, water, gas, and electricity for instance.

Licensing remains the best way forward IMO. But it has to be reformed.

P&R never worked in the past. What's that definition of madness again?

Lenagan and the majority of the other club chairmen have rejected a joke of a proposal. Good on them.

The only way P&R between Professional and Semi-Pro leagues could be made to work was to syphon funds from the Pro league and give them to the Semi-Pro league. In effect they wanted to reduce the quality of SL to bring it closer to the Championship just to make P&R remotely feasible. They should be looking at how to level up, not down.

You can't reform or revivify something so utterly damaged, IMO. 'Licensing - this time we're going to do it properly' - try selling that to the Championship clubs!
They trusted it once and will be familiar with that definition of madness too, I'm sure.

While that would help improve the quality of play off games, it also contributes to more dead rubbers, as teams further down the ladder find the play offs beyond their reach.

Having just read the RFL statement about how administration of the licensing process basically made them useless at the commercial stuff I think I may change my mind and agree with you. FFS.



If we have a chance at putting together a competently run franchise/license scheme that remains by far the best option. Of course that would seem to be predicated on replacing the entire RFL now...

BTW, I'm really not interested in selling anything to the Championship clubs. Way too much 'tail wagging the dog' goes on in this sport as it is.

Exactly right. So called professional clubs are often just an amateur organisation that are trying to buy status usually by paying players more than they are worth or can afford. Too many of these teams are trying to emulate their neighbours and compete with them for talent and spectators thus simply diluting the pool of talent and money available. If we keep going down that route we'll end up with a bigger game at a more and more amateur level. The best talent will always look to exploit it and will go to other sports , Union especially , if there is no prospect of making money and hitting the "big time" in League in the UK. There just has to be an elite group of clubs for the best talent to aspire to and it has to be of a size that allows that talent to be spread so that the competition is more intense. 12 teams max and a top 5 or 6 playoff and carry on with the , admittedly flawed , licence system with some tougher rules in the hope that the young talent that is around the academies of Wigan , Saints , Leeds and hopefully Hull and Rovers are given a truly professional game to aspire to.

The dead rubbers are a result of the vastly differing quality of clubs in SL. No system is going to eliminate them without first addressing that underlying issue. Stretching the playoffs to include clubs with no realistic chance of competing in them fixes nothing.

The same with P&R - it would be the same few clubs involved every year, changing only when one or more of them went out of business.

Possibly, but we can't then be surprised if they decide to go off and pursue their own agendas and interests. Or FOaD.

A tail-less dog, with a multiple personality disorder and no master, is my fear for a SL club coup.

My bet is on some sort of half-d compromise that manages to combine the worst of all possible options. But then I'm both a cynic and a pessimist.

At least you won't be disappointed!

I would imagine you would struggle to get anyone to take up that bet.

I'm all for promotion & relegation if we had enough competitive and self-sufficient clubs to see a bit of variety, and if the chances of survival for promoted sides were better. Unfortunately, the reality is that we probably have about 16 clubs who might be able to make a go of a top flight club even given more time than one season, and the gap between the 2 divisions is just too hard to bridge more than once every 5 years or so unless another club goes into meltdown. It'll just revert again to 11 or 13 constants and a guest star for that season.

To compare to football, it's not really like looking at a promoted Championship team's chances of survival in the premier league (which are not great), it's closer to sticking a League 2 side straight up there with their part-time squad and 2 months to cobble together the best of everyone else's cast-offs (with no transfer kitty) and seeing how they get on.